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The vaults of Scepter, Wand and Musicor were the first to which we gained unlimited access. The great thing about that from a personal point of view was that my co-founder of the 6Ts soul club, Randy Cozens, had championed Scepter and Wand since the mid-60s. Wand’s main acts, Chuck Jackson and Maxine Brown, were the most played and revered artists to feature at our dances.

Florence Greenberg had formed the labels in the late 50s, recording mainly black acts from the New York area. The success of the company was guaranteed once the Shirelles began a string of hits in 1960 with the chart-topper ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’. An astute businesswoman with a great feel for the music, Florence knew to employ the cream of producers, arrangers and songwriters available and could hustle with the best of them. This was shown with her purchase of Maxine Brown’s contract from the major ABC label when her career there stalled.

Florence’s ability to get some of the best songs from the Brill Building and 1650 Broadway writers was demonstrated in the stream of pop-soul masterpieces that she secured for Dionne Warwick from the hottest composers in town, Bacharach and David. Scepter also boasted Tommy Hunt, whose record ‘Human’ was a big R&B hit, and later pop singer B.J. Thomas, who sold millions of records in the second half of the 60s. Those major talents were augmented by acts such as Rosco Robinson, Freddie Hughes and Nella Dodds, as well as great one-miss-wonders Jack Montgomery, Wally Cox, the Ivorys and the Gentleman Four.

The first few various artist compilations Kent issued featured mainly the lesser-known acts whose discs had been adopted by the Northern Soul scene. There were also solo sets from Chuck Jackson, Maxine Brown, Tommy Hunt and the Shirelles. In 1984 we gained access to the Nashville-housed master tapes and unearthed a slew of wonderful unissued recordings. To British soul fans’ ears it was almost criminal that they had been deemed not good enough for public consumption. Tracks from Maxine, Chuck, the Shirelles, Tommy, Bettye Lavette, Maurice Williams and others helped revitalise a sub-culture that had struggled through the early 80s.

Playing an equal part in this belated New York soul explosion was the Musicor catalogue. Musicor sported the Platter’s stunning mid-60s period, Porgy & the Monarchs, Jimmy Radcliffe, Sammy Ambrose and a single by the young Melba Moore. By the mid-70s, Melba’s 45 had enjoyed enough plays on the UK’s soul dance circuit to warrant bootlegging, but it was the discovery of the third track from the session, the soulful original version of ‘The Magic Touch’ (as recorded by the Bobby Fuller Four), which shook the rare soul world. With all the qualities of the best Wigan Casino dancers, it became massive across the UK’s Northern scene and quickly spread via scooterists and mods right across Europe. Coming at the peak of that first Euro soul movement, it was one of the key records to convert so many devoted soul fans. 

Charlie would have hated all this fuss and bother over him. He was the most self effacing man I have ever met, and in the last year or more I confirmed that view, working with him on the ‘Honky Tonk’ CD. It was entirely about the music and the people who made it and the people who helped them produce it and get it out there and promote it. That’s what excited Charlie.

There probably has never been a greater example of rock’n’roll revisionism than the current respect accorded to the Sonics. Cult heroes may come and go, but the Sonics’ ascension to become the quintessential garage rock band of all time is truly remarkable. Unlike, say, the Stooges or the Velvet Underground, there was really no awareness of the Sonics, outside of their native Pacific Northwest, until the late 1980s. Slowly but surely, the bands distinctive brand of noise has percolated up through generations of rock fans to almost enter the mainstream. For instance, in the past few years, the Sonics’ paint-peeling take on Richard Berry’s ‘Have Love Will Travel’ has been a regular fixture of television ads the world over.

There’s a simple reason why the Sonics strike such a chord. Theirs is likely the sharpest definition of garage rock that has ever existed. The rough-hewn quintet from blue-collar Tacoma, Washington drew from the implicit rawness of the 50s heroes like Little Richard and Jerry Lee, revved it up with post-British Invasion attitude, threw in the Northwest’s own unique translation of R&B energy, and in the process arrived at a sound that is the very essence of what rock should be: rock’n’roll boiled down to its very nub.

The core of the Sonics were the Parypa brothers, Larry on guitar and Andy on bass, who founded the group in the late 1950s. Like every other neophyte rock’n’roll combo in the Northwest, they looked up to local bigwigs the Wailers for inspiration. The embryonic group mutated through different personnel until singer and keyboardist Jerry Roslie entered the fray in late 1963, bringing along his school pals Rob Lind on sax and Bob Bennett on drums. Within months of this new line-up coming together, a drastic change occurred. Together as a band, the Sonics amped up their sound to a cruder, rougher style, in an almost subconscious attempt to distil the furious energy that beat at the heart of the rock’n’roll and R&B they so enjoyed.

Headquartered at teen hotspot The Red Carpet in the Tacoma suburb of Lakewood, where the Sonics regularly jammed the joint, it wasn’t long before Buck Ormsby of the Wailers grabbed the quintet for the Wailers’ own Etiquette label. A first attempt to harness their fury in the recording studio left the group non-plussed, but when ‘The Witch’ was released in November 1964, it quickly began to get heavy airplay, capturing the imagination of teens around Puget Sound and beyond. No-one had heard rock quite that visceral on the radio in recent memory.

The follow-up, ‘Psycho’, was recorded in the spring at Kearney Barton’s famed Seattle facility, and was another Roslie-penned hamburger-throated opus. It became as big a hit with audiences and radio around the Northwest as ‘The Witch’, and both tunes rocked the airwaves well into the summer of 1965. The Sonics’ fiery template was firmly established by these first two singles, along with the fabulous sequels ‘Boss Hoss’ and ‘Shot Down’, and the entire contents of the album “Here Are The Sonics” - surely one of the most uncompromising debuts in rock history. Rather than pad out the record with the expected hits of the day, the band filled the grooves with choice interpretations of rock’n’roll and R&B classics, all laden with their patented trademarks – searing, abrasive guitar tones, guttural vocals and pounding, unrelenting drums. And Roslie displayed a very real knack for writing – and screaming - ear-catching originals such as the classic ‘Strychnine’.

Throughout most of 1965, the Sonics wreaked havoc on audiences the length and breadth of the Northwest and beyond, and simultaneously upped the ante of the entire region’s music scene. Most remarkably, the bands dynamism even effected a change upon their mentors the Wailers, whose post-Sonics recordings very clearly bore signs of their former apprentices’ influence. October of 1965 saw the release of a fourth Etiquette single, perhaps the most ferocious to date: ‘Cinderella’/ ‘Louie Louie’ was a double-whammy of epic proportions. It was accompanied by the Sonics’ second album, “Boom”, recorded at the lo-fi Wiley/Griffith studio in Tacoma but nevertheless continuing in the same full-blooded vein as previous releases.

Word had seeped out to other parts of the country about this wild young combo, and Sonics releases were getting a lot of interest from radio stations in markets as far away as Pittsburgh and Florida. This led the group to question Etiquette’s efficiency, and miscommunication between band and label ultimately meant that the Sonics decided to part ways with Ormsby in the spring of 1966. Waiting in the wings was Jerry Dennon, whose well-distributed Jerden imprint had most of the Northwest’s talent under contract. Dennon romanced the band with the possibility of national success.

At first, the Sonics’ Jerden singles acted as a natural progression from their no-holds-barred Etiquette sides, and the initial single, ‘You’ve Got Your Head On Backwards’, a Brit-styled pounder sung by Lind, was a strong seller in the autumn of 1966. At Dennon’s behest, the group traveled to Gold Star in Los Angeles for the sessions that would become their third and final album, “Introducing.” In retrospect, the sides the group cut there are certainly far better than is generally acknowledged, and including screamers such as ‘High Time’ and ‘Like No Other Man’. But the Sonics never really recaptured in Hollywood the pure unadulterated magic that their Etiquette sessions had in abundance, something reflected by the diminishing sales of their later Jerden releases.

From there on, it seemed all downhill. The combo continued for another year, making their first and only trip back east, but the military was at the door, and once they had finished with their education, various band members began to drop out in 1967 or, like Roslie, just quit unexpectedly. The single ‘Lost Love’ was their last rocking effort but in truth, there didn’t seem to be a place for Sonics-style dementia in the face of flower power. In a cruel twist of fate, a faceless Holiday Inn lounge act inherited the band’s good name, and watered it down well into the next decade.

However, the legend of Tacoma’s once-raging rock machine began to gather moss after collectors outside the Northwest happened across the amazing Etiquette records, and began theorising in magazines such as Creem in the mid-1970s as to what kind of band could have created such a noise. Shortly afterwards, a renewed energy resurfaced in rock’n’roll that correlated exactly with the emotions that the Sonics had espoused a decade before: punk rock. The resourceful Ormsby had hung onto the band’s vintage masters, and began to reissue them in an attempt to keep the band’s memory alive. He eventually struck a deal with Big Beat for a comprehensive anthology of the Sonics’ Etiquette material, which was released in 1993 as “Psycho-Sonic”.

Fast forward to the late 2000s. “Psycho-Sonic”, now remastered after the discovery of ear-blasting first-generation tapes, is one of the best-selling items in the entire Ace Records catalogue, in the process turning a couple of generations onto the band’s savage sound. The best of the Sonics’ Jerden sides, including unissued material, is included on the exhaustive Big Beat series “Northwest Battle Of The Bands”. And in an unprecedented and exciting turn of events, the Sonics have recently reformed around the core of Jerry, Larry and Rob to dish out some long-overdue authentic Sonics rock’n’roll, delighting fans around the world in the process. Make sure you don’t miss them – but grab a hold of “Psycho Sonic” first, to properly understand what all the fuss is about.

Alex Chilton, the Memphis rock iconoclast best known as a member of 1960s pop-soul act the Box Tops and 1970s cult group Big Star, died of apparent heart problems in New Orleans on 18 March. He was 59 years old.

Midsummer is always a special month for European lovers of Southern Soul. For the past 25 years, in a small, friendly, picturesque ‘spa town’ in Northern Italy called Porretta Terme, Italian music promoter and Otis Redding obsessive Graziano Uliani has been curating and ‘creatively directing’ Porretta Soul, probably the longest running - and almost certainly the best – music festival of its kind anywhere in the world.